Change The Game - A Simple Framework For Experimentation Change Management
“ An anti-change mindset is more common than we think. Even in situations of life or death, people can still be reluctant to change their behaviours. If you want your experimentation program to thrive, a large proportion of your time should be dedicated to organisational change management”.
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Introduction
You’ve probably heard that old saying about forming a habit: it takes about a month of steady, consistent change to create and embed a new behaviour. But what scientists are quickly learning about human behaviour is that creating change is far more difficult than simply tweaking a daily routine.
Whether you’re trying to quit smoking, cut down on procrastination or implement changes to your workplace culture, your brain is hard-wired to rely on instinctual tendencies that are millions of years old, and working against those impulses can sometimes feel near-impossible.
In this article, I speak with Ruben de Boer, Lead Conversion Consultant at Online Dialogue, who has spent over a decade successfully leading world-class clients through the process of driving change. Today we’re going to talk about Ruben’s custom-made Change Management Framework, which has been employed by a host of organisations in order to more effectively navigate the business change process to succeed with experimentation faster.
In this article we discuss:
The barriers to organisational change
Why is change so hard?
Systems of change management
A framework for experimentation change management
1. Barriers to organisational change
It’s easy for companies to talk about making changes — but not as many can speak to the challenges that stand in the way of creating those changes.
Ruben has observed two significant barriers when businesses are tasked with managing the experimentation change process:
1. A narrow mindset:
While experimentation teams are the primary custodians of experimentation in a business, Ruben stresses that there’s much more to enacting change than performing experiments. “A large proportion of your work should be dedicated to change management, if you really want your experimentation program to thrive,” says Ruben. “Your job is to motivate, involve and get others onboard… and thus really grow the whole company as a result.”
2. Legacy cultural beliefs:
He also notes that another impediment to change is legacy beliefs and ideas. Many people in large organisations have worked in that same company or industry for years, and as a result their processes and patterns become ingrained. It can be difficult to convince longtime employees to give up past beliefs — even if the data shows that those beliefs might no longer be successful in our modern business landscape.
2. Why is change so hard?
It’s clear that a lack of change is often a barrier to good experimentation. But why is it so hard to change? If company leaders know that change could greatly benefit their organisation, why cling to legacy ideas and beliefs?
In truth, an anti-change mindset is more common than we think. In fact, even if change is a matter of life and death, people hardly alter their behaviours as a result. To illustrate this, Ruben points to a famous study on coronary heart disease conducted by cardiologist and researcher Dr. Edward Miller. Miller studied patients who were living with clogged arteries, a condition that, if left untreated, almost always leads to a premature, painful death.
“All these patients with clogged arteries, they can survive … and the solution is pretty simple. They need to change their lifestyle - they should stop smoking, stop drinking, eat healthy, start exercising, and reduce stress in their lives. And when they succeed with that, almost all these patients will survive, and get healthy. Almost everyone can survive coronary heart disease.”
But — as you might’ve suspected — most don’t. The numbers show that only around 10% of patients who live with coronary heart disease go on to make meaningful lifestyle changes. This got Ruben thinking: if change is this difficult, even when it’s a matter of life and death, what is the best way to impact the culture and mindset of an entire organisation?
This is where Ruben’s Change Management Framework began: as a template for creating change, despite the stark hurdles that creating change requires.
3. Systems of change management
To create his Change Management framework, Ruben studied the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow documents the two different systems our brains use to process experiences and make decisions:
System 1: Involves the processes tied to our primal, instinctual brain in the limbic system. System 1 decision-making is fast, reflexive and automatic, occurring unconsciously based on intuition, feelings and emotions. It is largely guided by ingrained, predetermined behaviours — we make up to 95% of our decisions this way.
System 2: System 2 is a metaphor for our rational brain in the neocortex. System 2 decision-making is slower, deliberate, analytical and reflective. These are our logical thinking processes for conscious, complex decision-making. System 2 is capacity limited - we only spend 5% of time in this mode due to the high level of cognitive load.
How do these two systems impact our approach to change in the workplace?
Ruben states that our System 2 brains know that in order to create change in others, we have to educate them on new principles. At the same time, it’s our System 1 brains that make this kind of change so difficult, with or without education. Even if we know that our competitors are changing to keep up with the marketplace, that won’t make us more inclined to update our own operating principles.
Put another way: System 2 is your brain telling you to wake up early tomorrow to exercise, because doing so will yield results in six months. But System 1 is your brain telling you to shut off your alarm and go back to sleep.
If you’re enjoying this article, listen to the full podcast conversation on Experimentation Masters
4. A framework for experimentation change management
How does knowing about our different thinking and decision-making modes help us impact our ability to change?
The goal, says Ruben, is to get these two systems on the same page. If you can manage that, you’ll be able to create lasting modifications to your own behaviour, as well as the behaviour of others.
Here’s where Ruben’s Change Management Framework comes into play. To get those systems on the same page, you need to tweak the following:
Physical environment
Social environment
Rewards and incentives
Rules and norms
Achieve this and change happens – successful experimentation is the result.
A framework for experimentation change management
Credit: Ruben de Boer
(A) Physical Environment
When it comes to impacting physical environments, this should come naturally to product designers. After all, you’re constantly tweaking products and websites every day to gain more website traffic and change consumer behaviour.
By applying these same principles to a physical workspace, change can become more feasible.
Changing the physical environment:
Email updates
Data dashboards
Display screens / monitors
Posters and banners
Artefacts – trophies
Product Fair
Stall / Information Booths / Intercepts
Changing the physical workspace can be a catalyst for change.
“So, we can test with sending update emails, with insights from experiments to our colleagues, we can apply gamification, we can create accessible data dashboards and place them on monitors throughout the office,” says Ruben. “
(B) Social Environment
Changing our social expectations to be more inclusive of good experimentation principles can work wonders when creating lasting change.
Product designers already know the power of social proof, ratings, reviews, testimonials, and success stories — why not incorporate them internally as an experimentation driver?
Changing the social environment:
Create a community
Cross-functional experimentation champions
Idea generation sessions
Listen to customer calls
Watch usability tests
Lunch and learn sessions
Experimentation University
All Hands presentations
“Create a community of experimentation enthusiasts and promoters - host idea generation sessions, celebrate successes, and especially failures together, and have colleagues watch usability tests together. Everything that you can do to involve people, bring them together, and create a community to create social proof in your organisation is important.”
(C) Rewards and Incentives
Where physical and social environments create new ways of working and interacting with one another in the organisation, rewards and incentives help to embed desirable behaviours – both success and failure.
The acknowledgement of positive failure that results in organisational learning is an equally important part of experimentation.
Changing rewards and incentives:
Experiment of the Month
Failure Board
Failure Trophy
Idea generation competitions
Award celebrations
“One case I've seen work really well last year was with a client where we needed to engage more people,” says Ruben. We wanted more test ideas … so we set up an idea competition. We had three rewards; one for each different value driver. The prize for the competition was small — somewhere around $900 USD. Despite this, more than half of the organisation participated in the idea generation competition.”
On top of this, Ruben’s team was able to notify the winning contributors of their reward through a social platform, being formally acknowledged and recognised throughout their department as making a significant contribution. This further impacted their behaviour, says Ruben, and allowed the company to move toward more frequent idea generation competitions as a means of operation.
(D) Rules and Norms
When it comes to creating change, rules and norms can be a trickier proposition, particularly implementing hardline or mandatory rules.
Implement the wrong rules or norms and it can produce a host of perverse behaviours.
Approach rules and norms with caution. Implementation of stringent rules that are disliked or counterproductive could decrease engagement with your experimentation program.
Changing rules and norms:
Talk to customers weekly
Listen to customer calls weekly
Watch website recordings as a team each Tuesday lunchtime
All new product features are to be tested
Experimentation template completed for all experiments
Experiments to be supported by qualitative / quantitative insights
“One business created “Fuck-Up Friday's”. On the last Friday of each month, between 4pm and 5pm, everyone closes their laptops and stops working. Everyone shares their biggest fuck-ups of the month together. It’s fun and there’s a lot of laughter. It sets the norm that failure is OK. This helps people to take risks to experiment and not stay on the safe side.”
Attack anti-change from all angles
If you want to succeed with experimentation faster in your organisation, you need to attack organisational change from all sides.
Key takeaways:
Humans are hard-wired to resist change. An anti-change mindset is more common than we think
Engage different thinking and decision-making modes to impact change
Think of creative Physical, Social, Rewards and Norms to encourage behavioural change
Failing to manage the organisational change process will introduce barriers to experimentation. 50% of your time should be dedicated to performing experiments, and 50% of time dedicated to managing organisational change.
If you can achieve this, change will happen – successful experimentation is the result.
Need help with your next experiment?
Whether you’ve never run an experiment before, or you’ve run hundreds, I’m passionate about coaching people to run more effective experiments.
Are you struggling with experimentation in any way?
Let’s talk, and I’ll help you.
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